Review: MacBook Air (Mid 2009)

The MacBook Air is a product that lives on the margins. It’s the slowest laptop—indeed, the slowest computer—in the Mac line. It omits many features that are standard on other Mac laptops, including multiple USB ports, FireWire ports, Ethernet port, and optical drive. And the latest top-of-the-line MacBook Air is actually slower than its predecessor in many of our tests. In short, the MacBook Air is an odd duck.

It’s also Apple’s thinnest, lightest laptop. And I still love it.

MacBook Air

Let me explain. I love the MacBook Air because it’s a full 680g lighter than the next-lightest Apple laptop. In a world of netbooks that compromise on screen and keyboard size in order to get small, the MacBook Air has an excellent 13-inch widescreen display and a full-sized, backlit keyboard.

The MacBook Air is designed for people who appreciate the fact that this Mac laptop weighs 1.4kg and measures 19mm at its thickest point, and are willing to sacrifice all sorts of other features for that lightness. Which leads to the real question: Do the new MacBook Air models sacrifice too many features to make them worth the trade-off in both price and size?

Let’s ponder, for a moment, how far the MacBook Air line has come in terms of price. When the MacBook Air premiered, the top-of-the-line model-featuring a 1.86GHz processor and a 64GB solid-state drive cost $3,999. The low end of the line was a $2,999 model with a 1.6GHz processor and an 80GB hard drive.

So in 18 months, the top-of-the-line Air has dropped over $1,200 (you could buy a whole second MacBook for that) while adding 330MHz of processor power and doubling the storage space. The base configuration, meanwhile, has dropped in price by a tidy penny while also gaining a modest processor boost and double the hard-drive space. In other words, the MacBook Air is far more affordable than it was when it was introduced.

This is not to say that it’s a great deal in terms of price/performance. You’re still paying for that super-light chassis. For the same price as today’s entry-level 1.86GHz MacBook Air ($2,399), you can buy a 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 2.53GHz processor, double the RAM of the MacBook Air, more than twice the hard-drive space, more USB and FireWire ports, an optical drive, and an SD card reader. It’s also thicker and weighs a pound and a half more.

Small, light, and limited. On the outside, these new MacBook Airs look just like the original MacBook Air models introduced in January 2008. And as always, the Air’s physical connectivity options remain quite limited: There’s just a single USB 2.0 port, a headphone jack, and a Mini DisplayPort. There’s no FireWire connectivity, and everything else you connect to the system has to go wireless (via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi) or filter through that single USB port.

Apple includes a 10/100 USB-to-Ethernet adapter in the box now, which is generous, but the fact remains that if you’re trying to download a file over Ethernet while backing up to a USB hard drive, you will tax that single USB port to the limit. (You’ll also need to invest in a serious USB hub.) What’s worse, the $139 MacBook Air SuperDrive must be attached to the MacBook Air directly and doesn’t offer any passthrough ports of its own, making it impossible to boot from a DVD and then restore from a Time Machine backup stored on an external hard drive. Well, impossible’s too strong a word: I was able to pull the trick off by using Apple’s $1499 LED Cinema Display, which will also power the SuperDrive, as the world’s most expensive USB hub.

But with the update to the MacBook Air line in late 2008, Apple seriously upgraded the Air’s internals. The first-generation Airs used Intel’s slow onboard video circuitry and couldn’t cope with warm temperatures at all, but the new models added Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics circuitry, improved bus and memory speeds, and generally coped with heat much better. These new models also incorporate those improvements, which dramatically improve the MacBook Air experience.

Despite the improved graphics and the faster processors, it’s important to point out that these two MacBook Air models are the two slowest Macs currently shipping. Even the $1,599 2.13GHz MacBook managed a Speedmark score of 198 in our tests, compared to a score of 175 for the top-of-the-line 2.13GHz Air. The $2,399 13-inch 2.53GHz MacBook Pro scored 239, while the 1.86GHz MacBook Air with the same price scored 156.

What’s weird about the new high-end MacBook Air model is that although it cost dramatically less than its immediate predecessor, it was also slower than that model. The late-2008 1.86GHz MacBook Air was faster than the new top-of-the-line model in 11 of our 18 tests, and as a result, the old system’s final Speedmark score was slightly higher. The low-end 1.86GHz model did a better job versus its predecessor, besting it on most tests and improving on its Speedmark score.

We also saw several cases in which the lower-end systems, with slower processors but with hard drives rather than solid-state drives, bested their high-end equivalents. Some of these results simply come down to the fact that solid-state drives are faster than physical hard drives at some tasks and slower at others. But on tasks we tend to consider particularly processor intensive, such as compressing video or rendering 3-D objects, the low-end systems also outperformed the higher-end systems. We’re not quite sure why this is happening, though it’s possible that the Air’s thermal-protection systems are aggressively ratcheting down the speed of the faster, hotter processors when they’re asked to perform those tasks, slowing their performance.

Benchmarks: MacBook Airs

Speedmark 5

Adobe Photoshop CS3

Cinema 4D XL 10.5

Compressor 3.0.4

iMovie HD

iTunes 7.7

Quake 4

Finder

Finder

Battery Life

OVERALL SCORE

SUITE

RENDER

MPEG ENCODE

AGED EFFECT

MP3 ENCODE

FRAME RATE

ZIP ARCHIVE

UNZIP ARCHIVE

LOOP MOVIE

MacBook Air/2.13GHz

175

1:18

1:37

3:17

1:25

1:43

25.3

6:12

1:03

2hrs 37mins

MacBook Air/1.86GHz

156

1:25

1:24

2:49

1:09

1:30

23.8

6:05

1:58

2hrs 49mins

13-inch MacBook Pro/2.53GHz (4GB)

239

0:53

0:50

1:52

0:46

0:58

39.3

4:11

1:14

3hrs 31mins

13-inch 2.13GHz MacBook

198

1:08

1:00

2:02

0:56

1:07

33.5

5:15

1:29

3hrs 22mins

MacBook Air/1.86GHz (Oct. 2008)

179

1:19

1:32

3:00

1:16

1:36

25.2

5:49

1:03

2hrs 21mins

MacBook Air/1.6GHz (Oct. 2008)

145

1:26

1:24

2:51

1:09

1:31

26.3

6:45

2:00

2hrs 29mins

Best results in bold. For Speedmark and Quake 4, higher scores are better. All other tests are timed results where lower times are better (except for Battery Life, where longer times are better). Reference systems in italics.

Speedmark 5 scores are relative to those of a 1.5GHz Core Solo Mac mini, which is assigned a score of 100. Adobe Photoshop, Cinema 4D XL, iMovie, iTunes, and Finder scores are in minutes:seconds. The systems were running Mac OS X 10.5.7 with 2GB of RAM except where noted. The Photoshop Suite test is a set of 14 scripted tasks using a 50MB file. Photoshop’s memory was set to 70 percent and History was set to Minimum. We recorded how long it took to render a scene in Cinema 4D XL. We used Compressor to encode a 6minute:26second DV file using the DVD: Fastest Encode 120 minutes – 4:3 setting. In iMovie, we applied the Aged Film ffect from the Video FX. menu to a one minute movie. We converted 45 minutes of AAC audio files to MP3 using iTunes’ High Quality setting. We used Quake’s average-frames-per-second score; we tested at a resolution of 1,024 by 768 pixels at the Maximum setting with both audio and graphics enabled.. We duplicated a 1GB folder, created a Zip archive in the Finder from the two 1GB files and then Unzipped it.—Macworld Lab testing by James Galbraith, Blair Hanley Frank, Chris Holt, and Helen Williamson.

Macworld’s buying advice. When I was working on this review, I had to temporarily surrender my previous-generation 1.86GHz MacBook Air so it could be re-tested by Macworld Lab as a reference system. For five days I used a new 13-inch MacBook Pro, replete with ports and features that the Air lacks. And while I appreciated having dedicated Ethernet and hooking up my backup drive via FireWire 800, the truth is, the whole time I longed to return to the Air.

If those feelings make no sense to you, if the Air always struck you as being overpriced and underpowered, these aren’t the laptops you’re looking for. Because the MacBook Air story is the same as it ever was: If what you want out of your Mac laptop is the best combination of speed and price, the MacBook Air’s not for you. It’s hobbled by having only a single USB port. Its processor is slow and it’s locked into 2GB of RAM. There’s no FireWire, no optical drive (without an expensive add-on with nonexistent connectivity or compatibility), and the only way to connect to an Ethernet network is via an included USB adapter.

But if the specs that matter most to you are light weight and small size, the MacBook Air is the system for you. These new models aren’t much faster than their predecessors—in fact, the high-end system is slower than the previous model—but they’re cheaper. If the MacBook Air always appealed to you, but you were turned off by the price tag, it’s time to reconsider the Air.

[Jason Snell is Macworld’s editorial director.]

Product MacBook Air/2.13GHz

Rating 3.5

Pros Weighs 1.4kg; thin; full-size keyboard; bright 13-inch display.

Cons Slower than all other Apple laptops; single USB port limits connectivity.

Company Apple

Price as rated $2,799

Product MacBook Air/1.86GHz

Rating 3.5

Pros Weighs 1.4kg; thin; full-size keyboard; bright 13-inch display.

Cons Slower than all other Apple laptops; single USB port limits connectivity.

Sign up to the Macworld Australia newsletter

Sign up to the newsletter

Please select the newsletter/s you would like to receive: Wednesday HelpdeskFriday RoundupMac in BusinessCountry*Location if Australia*Who are you? *What are you more interested in? *MaciPadiPhoneAppsGadgetsHardwareSoftwareBusiness SolutionsBusiness size *